What Time Is It?

Cengiz Çekil is one of the pioneers of contemporary art in Turkey. He became acquainted with conceptual art when he went to Paris on a state scholarship in the early 1970s. Having gone beyond conventional materials, he continued to produce works with everyday objects and found items, incorporating the concept of time and its social and political dimensions into his work until his passing in 2015. In Çekil’s installations, we often encounter wristwatches, table and wall clocks, and their internal mechanisms as the material of his work; however, this time the work is formulated around the repetition of the interrogative sentence “What Time Is It?”. Using screen-printing to reiterate this everyday question on the pages of newspapers, aligning it with the headlines, Çekil creates a record of the political history of Turkey. “What Time Is It?” invites the audience to contemplate the power of media to shape the times we live in. The work entered the Arter Collection after it was exhibited for the first time in the eponymous exhibition at the Yapı Kredi Kâzım Taşkent Art Gallery in 2008. In 2019, the work lent its name to a group exhibition at Arter and part of the series was displayed in the context of the inaugural programme of Arter’s new building in Dolapdere, connecting its two floors.

"What Time Is It?", exhibition view, Arter, 2019.